Day 1: Bogotá to La Sierra

I should have known how this day would go when the Colombian border guard said “oh, you’re from Canada. We have a problem.”

Starting at the beginning, though, I have decided to begin the Camino route but don’t expect to complete it. I had a great meeting with Omar last Thursday who basically said 60 to 80 kms a day is plenty in the mountains. He also said this route is gorgeous and gave me all sorts of useful information, and generally saved my sanity. And now I am underway.

It was a red eye flight, I slept some. Landed at 5 am. Same time zone here as in TO. Took 1,000,000 COP out of a bank machine and was so overwhelmed by the stack of cash I forgot my credit card in the machine. Not ideal, but no biggie by comparison to my next blunders.

Riding out of the airport and Bogotá itself was much less hairy than I imagined. Sure, it’s total chaos and everything and everyone is playing by their own rules, but there were tons of bikes and a surprising amount of bike lanes. It helped that the airport was fairly near the edge of the city I exited from.

Stupid thing number two I did today was to try to access one of these bike lanes too fast over a nasty bump. The one complaint I have about the cycling I did today are the transitions. For example, some curbs are well over a foot high. Anyway, I took a nasty spill and have some serious road rash.

The first town outside of Bogotá was Facatativa. I stopped there for lunch and to find internet to cancel my credit card. I got a small feast of potato and fish soup, and eggs, cheese, rice and patacones for $3. Plus the waitress went to a pharmacy and brought me gauze and wound cleaning supplies <3. I showed her pictures of cats and snow 🙂

After that I diverged from the main highway and started descending into the river valley. Got my first glimpses of the Andes. Wow! They are serious bumps!

At one point I was riding so fast I was worried about things flying off my bike. I did what I could to safely look back and noticed one of my 2 panniers was missing! I stayed oddly calm and started a 1.5 hour climb back to where I last knew it was attached. Nothing. Nada. Zip. I lost ALL my clothes other than what I am wearing and some other odds and ends. Basically 40% of my kit for this trip. This is bad and I feel like a complete idiot. It doesn’t help that I have to publicly report this folks!

Option one was to go back to Bogotá on a shopping spree. Option two was to carry on and deal with it in the small towns I’ll pass through. For whatever reason I quickly decided on the latter. I really don’t want to backtrack and I’m sure it’ll mostly work out. I work (besides the 10 stinging areas on my left side) and my bike works and these are the main things. And I have no doubt I’ll do justice to the latest fashions from small town Colombia 🤣 and get soaked by rain because I have no raincoat anymore.

Other than the master class in how to NOT do a trip like this, the day was actually quite good. The small roads through the mountains are stunning, the pueblas cute, the weather excellent (so far) and my first 3000 or so feet of climbing were not so bad!

I’m in a small and strangely clean and modern hotel in La Sierra. The room was $8 or so. Can you imagine?

It’s only 8 but I’m going to hit the hay right after I do an inventory of exactly what I lost 🙁

110 km or so today but split the ride in 2. This is the longer and hillier of them.

P.S. the border issue was that Canadians have to pay an $85 USD entrance fee. I gather from the sign posted at the payment spot it is some kind of retaliation for Canada using Biometrics at the border or some such gripe.